Sea of Sorrows

by James A. Moore

  “What the hell was that?” Manning was up and looking back the way they’d come.

  “Don’t know, chief,” Adams said. “But it was a long way off—and it came from the direction we’re headed.” She checked Decker, then each of the mercs, to make sure no one was hurt.

  “Cho!” Manning bellowed into his comm. “What’s the situation down there?”

  No answer.

  “Shit,” he said. “Well, we’d better find out what the hell that was.”

  At Manning’s command, they continued the way they were going, shielding their noses and mouths from the dust, which was only just beginning to settle. Decker found himself studying the walls and the ceiling. Whatever had happened could very well have caused structural damage. He wondered if they were in danger of having the entire mine collapsing around them.

  As much as that concerned him, there was something even more pressing. He could feel the aliens on the move, that hideous sensation of their malignance creeping through his skull. Whatever had caused the tremor, it seemed to have stirred up the hornet’s nest, as well.

  His pulse was still too fast and his breaths seemed too small, so he focused himself. Anything else came for him, he intended to handle it as quickly as possible. He checked his plasma rifle again, and reminded himself of an ancient truism.

  You’re not being paranoid when something really is out to get you.

  35

  BOOM

  Perkins stared at the bodies. She needed to get back to the comm. Soon, too, as her break was almost over. Break. That was a sad joke.

  Just a couple of the creatures had thrown the entire group into chaos, and one of them hadn’t even been full-grown. They were all spooked, and no one was following protocol. It was all Cho could do to keep up with Manning and his group, and it sounded as if they had lost a lot of good men.

  Now everyone was just coming and going, without rhyme or reason. Hell, she had done it herself.

  Cho should’ve had my ass in a sling, she thought. But he hadn’t, and things were getting worse.

  Her eyes drifted back to the spider-thing on the ground. What it had done to Colleen was monstrous, and the thing that had killed her from the inside had grown at an unbelievable rate. Only partly grown, it had taken off Lutz’s hand, and put him out of commission—if he even lived.

  And now, if Silas was right—and she really, really hoped he wasn’t—there were hundreds, maybe thousands of the things out there. Waking up. Fuck, they had destroyed an entire city, killed everyone in it.

  She hadn’t seen Silas in a while. Willis was missing, too.

  Maybe they’re off somewhere, cooking something up, she mused. As quickly as she thought it, though, she dismissed the idea. It didn’t seem like Silas’s speed, not after everything he had been through.

  Anderson was walking the tops of a couple of the larger stacks of supplies, doing her best to keep her eyes on the perimeter. Perkins climbed onto one of the shorter stacks and got her attention.

  “You seen Willis or Silas?”

  Anderson gave a half smile. She was never going to be anyone’s idea of a model, but she was attractive enough. They weren’t serious, but they’d spent a few nights together over the months they’d worked together.

  “Silas was headed for the lift. Willis went off that way.” She pointed toward yet another collection of building materials, this one stacked with lighting supplies and, oh, hallelujah, portable toilets.

  Thinking that he’d had the right idea, Perkins nodded her thanks, and headed for the latrines. Nature was calling.

  Halfway there she spotted Willis. He was closing a door in the cavern wall. Not a latrine, but a real door. It looked old—so much so that it blended in with the rock surface, making it almost invisible.

  Where the hell does that lead, she wondered. Had she not been heading in that direction, she’d have never seen him.

  She started to motion toward him, but before she could do so, the ground bucked under her feet, knocking her to the ground.

  The sound was impossible to miss. Thunder hammered down the path leading from the lift, followed by a cloud of dust. A moment later it repeated, and then one more time. Each report was so loud that it sent spears of pain through her skull. Instantly her hearing was gone, replaced by a sharp ringing that pierced her senses.

  She scrambled to her feet and headed for the rest of the group. Cho was moving, and so was Piotrowicz, and then they all were, every mercenary and explorer sprinting toward the truck. As they clambered into the cab and onto the flatbed, someone cranked the engine. But while she could feel the vibration, she couldn’t hear it. She was vaguely aware of someone trying to talk through the comm, but she couldn’t discern any of the words.

  The comm would have to wait.

  * * *

  By the time the truck lurched to a stop at the lift site, most of the dust had settled.

  Silas stood there, blood flowing in a rivulet down his arm, abrasions on his face and scalp, where the hair was thinnest. He was bleeding from a wound above his ear, but the cut looked superficial. The impact had knocked him to the ground, too. His body was coated with a thick layer of dust. In his hands he held a pulse rifle.

  Perkins instinctively reached for her own sidearm. Then she realized his weapon was aimed at the dirt. He looked toward them and said something, but she couldn’t hear him.

  Cho jumped off of the truck and hit the ground running, heading straight for the scientist, murder in his eyes.

  Behind Silas, debris clogged the entirety of the lift shaft. Three of the heavy support posts were shattered. There was no sign that they had been melted, but Perkins did the math. There were four slots on the pulse rifle designed to hold grenades. Even from a distance, she could see that three of the chambers were empty.

  Cho reached him first, and grabbed him by the shirt. He drew back to throw a punch, but the scientist just stood there. The tech stopped, his fist still in the air, but then he lowered it.

  “What the hell did you do?” Perkins demanded as she skidded up next to them. She could hear herself, but her voice sounded muffled.

  Silas looked directly at her and spoke slowly and clearly, his voice loud.

  “We can’t leave here,” he said, as if stating the obvious. “The contamination has to stop. There’s a planet full of people above us, and we can’t let them all be slaughtered by these things.”

  She stared at him, but couldn’t bring herself to speak. He’d just effectively killed every last one of them.

  Then she looked over at the lift, which had fallen down when Silas blew the supports. Mining equipment, raw trimonite ore, and heavy machinery now blocked the only possible exit available to them. She saw something dark, pooling, off to one side, and hoped it was oil. In another place she thought she might have seen an arm, sticking out from under the rubble.

  The thought made her shudder.

  Tons of raw materials and shattered equipment jammed the entire opening to the shaft above. Even if they could squeeze past, there was no guarantee of how far up the shaft was clogged with debris and ruination. There was no way that the people above them could get to them before they were dead.

  “I had to do it!” Silas was screaming now, but even his outraged bellows sounded like they were coming through thick wads of cotton. “You were going to leave here! You might be contaminated!”

  Cho drew his pistol. Silas looked right at him as he moved, and Perkins saw the motion out of the corner of her eye. She was still trying to put it all together in her head when Cho fired. The single shot blew Silas’s intellect all over the debris that was blocking their exit from the tomb he’d built for them.

  “You fucking idiot,” he said to the corpse that crumpled at his feet. “You didn’t save anyone.”

  He spat on the body.

  She felt her lips press together into a tight line. She should have been outraged. She should have been afraid that Cho might have lost his mind. Maybe he had, come to that. But
mostly what she was angry about was that the bastard beat her to it.

  If she was going to die down here, she wanted the satisfaction of killing the son of a bitch who had guaranteed her death.

  “That prick stole my rifle!” Piotrowicz looked at the wreckage, and the dead doctor and pointed.

  Cho stared hard at him for a moment, and then turned away. No one else dared speak—especially not the doctor’s former associates.

  “We have to find another way out of here.” Perkins looked toward the rest of the group. “Any suggestions?”

  Rosemont looked back toward the excavation site.

  “We could try the tubes.” She didn’t sound at all thrilled by the idea. “A few people have gone up that way.”

  Perkins scowled. “The one our team went up is blocked now. Has anyone gone up in those things, and come back down?”

  The woman shook her head. “Not really.” She was silent for a moment, then offered, “There’s also an access tunnel, but it’s narrow and it’s a very, very long walk up the stairs. I don’t even know if it’s clear, or if it has those… things in it.”

  Perkins thought back.

  “Would the entrance be off past the latrines?” she asked. The nod she got was all she needed. She nodded in return, and went to find Cho.

  She’d just reached him when a crash made her jump. It came from the lift tunnel, and was loud enough to pierce the slowly diminishing deafness. There was nothing to see, but whatever it was, it had to have been heavy.

  And then the lights above them flickered, and dimmed a bit.

  “What the hell?” Piotrowicz looked around, and his eyes sought the power source for the lights. “Something in there must’ve hit the cables. I’ll take a look and see if I can spot anything.” He shook his head as he started to move. “I need to get my damn rifle anyway.”

  Anderson had given up her place on top of the building materials, and was standing on top of the truck’s cabin. It was the best place for an unobstructed view of the surroundings, bleak as they were.

  “See anything?” Perkins asked.

  “Not yet,” she replied. “But I will soon.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Ever know anyone who could resist finding out the source of a loud noise? I mean, we came running, didn’t we?”

  “You think the bugs’ll come?”

  Anderson’s eyes kept scanning the distance, looking from time to time toward the ruined elevator shaft.

  “I’d bet on it,” she said. “I’d win.”

  Perkins nodded. Unfortunately, she agreed.

  “How do you think this is going to play out?”

  “If that dead fuck was right, we’re not getting out of this alive. It’s seven thousand feet of staircase to get to the top of this mess.”

  Above them the lights dimmed a second time, leaving the entire area locked into a fading twilight.

  Perkins was liking the situation less by the minute.

  36

  SHADOWS

  The sun set, and darkness came over the Sea of Sorrows.

  No one working on the dig site paid much attention, save to manually activate those few lights that didn’t come on automatically. There were always a few, it seemed, regardless of how many redundancies were built into a system.

  Luke Rand settled his considerable bulk into a chair in the dining hall. There were others around, but not many. Herschel and Markowitz were near the Hut, waiting while the engineers did what they could to unfuck whatever the hell had happened down there. The lift had crashed down, the teams on most of the levels had come up already, a good number of them shaken but no worse for the wear.

  Rand was still working on reducing the toxicity levels in the Sea of Sorrows. The plans to build Laramie Township had been scrapped, but with the discovery of the trimonite, the location remained a priority. More so than before, really. Where there was a profit to be had, Weyland-Yutani liked to be the first on the spot.

  Luke looked at his food, picked at it for a while, and decided he wasn’t really very hungry.

  Seeing Decker had done that to him. He liked Alan. He always had. He was a straight shooter, and that was a rarity. If the man liked you, you knew it. And if he didn’t, you knew that, too. He was smart, and he kept an open mind.

  So why had he screwed the man over? He couldn’t get it out of his head. And to make matters worse, Decker didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe he didn’t know.

  Either way, Luke didn’t have much of an appetite. Of course that wasn’t exactly a bad thing. He’d put on a few spare pounds, like enough to make an extra person.

  The chaos down below made him uncomfortable, too. It seemed too much like Karma, and he didn’t like that idea at all. Everyone working on the site knew about the alien ship—that wasn’t the sort of thing you could keep under wraps. Not for long. He’d seen it. Not in person, just the pictures that the first couple of teams brought up, but still.

  But what about the quarantine rules? Sometimes the damnedest things showed up when you were terraforming a planet. Like on DeLancy. It wasn’t pretty, what happened to the people there when a spore frozen in the permafrost had thawed during the terraforming. By the time Rand arrived, he was in full environment gear, helping gather the remains. That was when he decided to get out of the business and retire.

  And now he had a chance for that.

  All it cost him was Decker’s friendship. And a piece of his soul, maybe. It might be that Decker didn’t know, but Luke knew. He could barely stand to be around the bastard. He knew what the company had done. He’d received the call from the home office, making damn sure he stuck to the “official” story.

  Still, after DeLancy, losing Decker’s camaraderie was a small price. He’d pay it ten times over, no problem, if it got him away from this shit once and for all.

  He looked at his plate for another minute and gave up. The food all looked like crap and probably tasted just as good.

  * * *

  When he’d cleaned up his mess, he bought a couple of beers—these days he could afford the outrageous price—and left the building, heading for the barracks. A movie or two, and he’d get some sleep.

  Off in the semidarkness of the night, he saw something moving across the sand. He squinted to try for a better look. Something was crawling out of the sand, and then it vanished. There were a lot of things wrong with Luke’s health—even on a lower gravity planet, the whole weight thing caused issues—but there was nothing wrong with his eyes.

  He tucked his beers into his pockets. He wanted his hands free. One hand touched the comm on his hip. The other reached for his shock-stick. Luke was a big guy, and he could certainly handle himself in a fight, but lately there was a lot of talk about security breaches, and he had a lot of money on the line.

  He looked out over the sea, checking the mounds and the dunes and the mostly flattened terrain. The sky was getting darker, not because of the sun setting but because of the rain clouds moving in, and he took his time, trying to make sure he wasn’t just being paranoid.

  Damn. There was something out there. Fifty yards out he could see a couple of figures. They were trying not to be seen, but he spotted them.

  “Hey, Bentley? You on duty tonight?” His comm crackled in response.

  “Yeah. That you, Rand?”

  “Got it the first time. Hey, we may have a problem out here. I think I see someone out on the sand.”

  “Where are they? Near the Hut?”

  “No, they’re a good ways out. Maybe like a hundred meters past.”

  “Wouldn’t be the rescue team, then,” Bentley said. “Might be somebody that found a way out, though.”

  “Well, you want me to check it?”

  “Yeah, it’s just me here right now. I can’t leave the booth. Would you mind?”

  Luke sighed. He’d rather drink a beer. On the other hand, if someone had found a way out from the site, he maybe should check.

  “Yeah. I got this.” Luke started
walking, keeping his eyes on the spot where he’d seen the movements.

  “Any news from below?” he asked.

  “Yeah, and none of it’s good,” Bentley responded. “Far as I can tell, they can’t get below level three. If there’s anyone further down, we haven’t heard a peep from them. They’re trapped, and most likely dead.”

  Damn, that doesn’t sound good, he thought. It’s hard enough getting a signal down there on a good day.

  “Well, I’ll keep you informed,” he said to Bentley. “You do the same, yeah? I got friends down there.”

  “So do I, buddy.”

  He kept walking, and as he got closer, the shadow-shapes were visible again, and becoming more clearly defined. They were definitely people, but something about them didn’t look right. Were they wearing survival masks or something? He couldn’t decide.

  He covered another dozen yards, and then he stopped dead. The night had deepened further, but not enough to hide what he was seeing. These weren’t humans. He didn’t know what the hell they were, but humans didn’t have tails, or whatever sort of weirdness was sprouting from the backs of those things. And their heads were too damned long.

  He reached for his comm.

  “Bent?” he muttered, automatically dropping his voice. When there was no response, he spoke louder. “Bentley? I really think we got a problem out here.”

  “What’s that? Come again, Rand.”

  Then the two shapes turned toward the sound of his voice.

  “Oh, fuck me.” They started to move toward him.

  “Say what?”

  “Bentley! You gotta get the hell out here!” he said, and he was shouting now. “Bring a weapon. I mean it!” The things were coming faster, and they didn’t move right. They moved like dogs or something. They moved so damned fast.

  He reached for his shock-stick.

  Shock-sticks were designed as a non-lethal alternative to firearms and other security measures. They were set to give exactly enough juice to drop a person temporarily.